Motivation: Improve SNR and spatial resolution in deuterium metabolic imaging (DMI) on 3T in humans. Goal(s): Implement and validate a bSSFP DMI sequence; investigate whether up-take alone can be a measure for DMI. Approach: The DMI bSSFP sequence excites the whole volume with a block RF pulse, followed by 3D phase encoding, acquisition and phase rewinder. Three spatial dimensions are density-weighted phase-encoded, while spectral encoding is insufficient for separating different metabolites but used for artefact reduction. Results: Voxel size in human brain was improved from (2.4cm)3 for regular, spectrally-resolved MRSI to (1.5cm)3 for bSSFP MRSI in 10minutes scan time with minor loss in SNR. Impact: DMI provides valuable clinical information, such as tumour-treatment response, and might complement or even partially substitute PET. The significant gain in spatial resolution demonstrated here could be the missing link to establish DMI clinically on 3T.
Schulte et al. (Tue,) studied this question.